ConEmu is Windows Console Emulator with Tabbed Interface

In the early days of Windows operating system, it relied heavily on the DOS (disk operating system). Even when finally Windows separated paths from the DOS, it kept including a DOS command prompt that could be launched from inside the Windows. Later it was replaced with a command line interface and came with many new tools of its own. But even in its present form, the command prompt in Windows is a few steps behind from the Terminal of Linux operating system.

If you want to get more out of the command prompt in Windows then you can use the ConEmu – a Windows console emulator that comes with tabbed interface. When you launch this ConEmu application for the very first time,  you are asked to choose a few of the important settings. For example, you can choose the color scheme, the startup shell or task, how many instances should be run, whether to allow hotkeys, and more.

ConEmu

In the ConEmu interface, you can open a number of tabs – each of the tabs containing one type of the consoles. You can click on the small “plus” tab and choose the 32-bit or the 64-bit cmd.exe. You can also open the PowerShell console (again both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions can be launched).

ConEmu also supports all of the smaller applications that have a minimalist user interface such as Windows Notepad, PuTTY or Gvim. This is the only console emulator that supports default consoles (cmd.exe) and Windows Power Shell both without any problems. Moreover, you all types of terminals or programs can also be run with administrator privileges (for this you have to click on the “Plus” icon and choose open an elevated console tab).

ConEmu

If you want to use this for carrying out some of the system repair tasks across a number of computers, then you can use the portable version of the ConEmu that can be launched from any USB pen drive.

Conclusion: ConEmu is an advanced console emulator for Windows that can make life much easy for the system administrators or developers who have to use multiple command line interfaces at the same time. It is highly customizable, supports all kinds of terminals and  can be used to launch small useful tools like PuTTY.

You can download ConEmu from https://conemu.github.io/.